Dead Space Ignition

You know when you get the Special Edition DVD rather than the regular one, and you spend twice as much – and all you get is some storyboards and some barely playable mini-games… that’s what Dead Space: Ignition is like.

Yes, it only costs 400 Microsoft points – or is free if you pre-order the game… in the US! Still, with such a great sandbox to play in as Dead Space, you would expect something more than what you get here.  There are two sections to the game, and the first isn’t playable at all – it’s what would probably be called a ‘motion’ comic. Even when you had the art of Brian Bolland and the words of Alan Moore – when they made the motion comic Watchmen DVD it was pretty bad – and Watchmen is pretty much the greatest comic book ever! When you have art that looks as if it’s a rough storyboard sketch that has been colored in then hastily animated, it’s pretty damn terrible.

It’s not to say that the story is bad – it’s canon – being written by original Dead Space scribe Anthony Johnson, and actually gives a nice sense of back-story to the new environment of The Sprawl.  The story of IT guy, Franco, and his police girlfriend, Sarah, creates well realized characters in a short space of time… but the bad art and animation is distracting. Just for my taste, I would prefer to have had a proper comic book – or even the Dead Space comic book with decent art and narration that was available with the release of Dead Space on XBox Live rather than having rushed art and animation.

One of the nice things about the comic is that there are two points within the game where it branches. This means that there are four multiple endings which give some new information… but it’s really quite a chore to get just one of them, and the idea of having to play through the game another three times may even start to turn you off against the idea of markers and Necromorphs permanently.

The other part of the game is what is difficult to play through – there are three hacking ‘mini-games’… and let’s just hope they are part of this XBLA release and not an indication of the hacking sections in the main game.  If these are the main game hacking sections – then lets hope there’s an option to turn them off when Isaac heads to The Sprawl for real.

One of the hacking mini games – Trace Route – is a straight rip-off of one of the bit Generation games that was available for the Game Boy Advance called DotStream… just without the good level design. Or speed.  Or control.  Or fun. You ‘race’ against anti-virus software in order to crack the mainframe first.  Whatever. Then there’s Hardware Crack, which is their version of the mirror laser reflecting games that we’ve all seen a million times before done as a flash game. It’s not a bad version, but it just seems a bit bland. Then there’s a simple. generic, not that bad tower defense game called System Override. It has a mild twist, in that you don’t set up the towers, you send the drones attacking them.  Unfortunately, it takes away much of the strategy and turns it into a bit of a button masher.  As you progress through the story, the games become more complex… which means that they actually become less fun. Not good.

There are also multiplayer versions of the game… but the problems were never AI – they were baked right in from the start. Like with Dead Rising: Code Zero, it’s a noble intention to do something a little bit more than a game demo… and even to try and generate interest by providing free content if you pre-order the game (although it would be great if they could organise this in Europe as well as the US – it was written and produced by Englishmen for pity’s sake). I very much doubt that even the most hardcore fans would enjoy this – I am a hardcore Isaac fan and I would rather just have the story rather than the crappy mini games.  Or to have one really good hacking game rather than three mediocre ones.  What’s disappointing is this has been done by Sumo Digital, working with a great intellectual property.  There was such an opportunity to do something good.  Who wouldn’t have loved to play a Metroidvania style Dead Space shooter set in a 2D side on version of The Sprawl with a non Isaac character wearing armor. If the poster can have someone on a police version of Isaac’s armour – why can’t the preview game?